Episode 5 Peasgood’s nonsuch

Andy Peasgood’s picture of the Peasgood’s nonsuch in his parent’s garden

I followed Andy Peasgood on Instagram during lockdown and loved this former ballet dancer’s pictures of his garden. You can see them on his Instagram account @andypeasgood. He also now writes a column for Scotland Grows.

You can find the Orange Pippin site here - it is fascinating. And thanks to Richard Borrie for putting me in touch with Anna from BC. Richard spoke of the National Fruit Collection and mentioned Joan Morgan’s ‘The Book of Apples’ : A survey of apple varieties throughout the world, providing a history of apple-growing from earliest times, a practical section on growing apples and eating them, and a complete annotated directory of the finest varieties, together with lists of apple collections throughout the world. So if this podcast has left you wanting to learn more, there are plenty of places to go.

This story has taken me on a wonderful journey as you will have heard in the podcast. I have always loved spending time in archives - written or sound and as a radio producer I was lucky enough to make Archive Hours for BBC Radio 4. So you can imagine my excitement when Anna sent me these images of the documents, that have been handed down through her family.

Making the podcast made me curious to find out more, so I went to the RHS Lindley library

The wonderful staff presented me with a selection of books and journals and as I read through these I discovered more wonderful references to the naming of this apple 100 years ago.

On p37 of the Journal of the Royal Horticultural Society Vol  IV in an extract of the proceedings of the Fruit Committee on the 18th September 1872, sitting between Mr W. G. Pragnell who won a prize for Beet and Onions and a Cultural Commendation for Mr King, gardener to J Baum, Esq., for Pot Vines – sits Mr. Peasgood of Stamford with a First Class Certificate for a seedling Apple, named Peasgood’s Nonsuch of the Blenheim Orange type. 

I learned that the Fruit Committee had been formed in July 1858 and:

That the business of the Fruit Committee consists in examining and reporting upon all fruits or esculents bought under their notice, collecting information concerning the qualities of the Fruits grown in different parts of the United Kingdom, and advising the Council generally as to the best modes of increasing the Society’s power of promoting the improvement of Fruits and Esculents cultivated in Great Britain and Ireland.

 The Peasgood’s Nonsuch was exhibited at the National Apple Conference which was held in the RHS gardens in Chiswick in October 1883.  From a report of the conference compiled by Mr A.F Barron it’s possible to discover that two people exhibited the apple.  A Mr C Haycock of The Gardens, Barham Court Maidstone and a Mr R. Gilbert of The Gardens, Burghley House, Stamford.  Around this time there were some other more familiar fruits which received First Class Certificates, Bramley’s seedling was apparently not new but not as familiar but it began to be extensively planted after the 1883 Conference.  (RHS – A History)  In the 1885 National Pear Conference, ‘an unnamed cultivar exhibited by Rivers of Sawbridgeworth won high praise and was subsequently marketed by them as the ‘Conference pear, becoming the most commonly planted British pear of the 20th Century.’  (RHS – A History). In October 1888 at the joint Apple and Pear Conference in the RHS gardens at Chiswick, Mr Haycock is still displaying the Peasgood’s Nonsuch, Mr Gilbert is not.

So why did the Peasgood’s Nonsuch not reach such dizzying heights as the Bramley and the Conference pear?  The apples exhibited at a show at Crystal Palace had weighed 10 -12 oz each and had been pronounced by the Judges to be ‘the most handsome Autumn Apple in cultivation.   Was it as Andy and Anna concluded that these huge apples were just too big and any greengrocer would be hard pressed to find room for a tray of them! According to Rosie Saunders in the Apple Book, it has always been primarily a garden and exhibition variety being too soft for commercial use.  Certainly Anna describes it as turning to mush when you cook it.  Rosie Saunders concurs that it ‘makes a very good baking apple’.  

Anna’s Peasgood nonsuch apple tree growing in her garden

Baked apples always make me smile – it is the one food my husband does not eat and it was the desert presented to him on his first meeting with my parents – his prospective in-laws!

How to grow an Apple tree

Actually this is less of a how to grow but a what you will grow because Richard Borrie was just so fascinating when he talked about the genetics of apple trees. So what would happen if I found a Peasgood’s nonsuch apple and planted one of the pips?

When you plant the pip, it will not be a Peasgood’s nonsuch. All you'll be able to say is that the mother of your new pip seedling was a Peasgood’s nonsuch. The father, the pollen parent, is going to be whatever happened to be blowing around the orchard where the mother tree was located. You've no idea what that's going to be, but it could well be a crab apple. because most orchards use crab apples as pollinators because they produce so much pollen. And the chances of it being remotely good are miniscule. But don't let that put you off because you could sort of strike the jackpot. It could be the next Delicious. It could be something really special.

The other complication is that once you get your seedling growing, It's going to take about eight years before you see any fruit, much longer than you might think, and the tree will just get steadily bigger, and it will actually get, in the end, it could get to sort of five or six meters tall. So it's going to be a big thing. If you wanted to short circuit that process, then after about two or three years, you could take some cuttings and send them to a nursery that will propagate them on a dwarf rootstock, and then you'll start to see fruit a year or so later. So at least by then you'll get a feel for, have I got the next delicious apple or have I got a complete dud?

Every pip that you plant is actually a new variety. In that sense, apples are like humans. You have the mother and the father and then you have a new variety, that the child is a new, unique, individual variety. And if it turns out to be... a good variety, so it has a good flavor or good characteristics, then it would be propagated and cloned, if you like, and put on a rootstock. That's how all apple trees are produced. But at the start, it's a unique individual. And one of the things I think we've found with orange pippin is to compare apple varieties which have the same or have the same parentage. So in effect, they are. their siblings, they've got the same mother and the same father. Or what happens more often is they're cousins, so they might have the same mother and a different father.

If you look at the world's most famous apple varieties like Cox, like Golden Delicious for example, you'll find that huge numbers of new modern varieties have been developed using one or other of those as parents. And it's interesting to just see how how the qualities and characteristics of the parent are carried through into the children and the grandchildren, exactly as you would see with human children and grandchildren. Sometimes maybe the grandfather had red hair and that was bypassed in the next generation, but maybe one of the grandchildren has red hair. And it's that kind of following of characteristics that you also see with apple varieties.

Good luck on your apple tree adventures!

PS: And a listener - Linda, who recently ‘bought me a coffee’, shared with me where you can buy a Peasgood’s Nonsuch apple tree - so good luck to anyone who decides to plant one, let me know how you get on!